Redefining Incredible; Redefining Search

Nicolas Dessaigne |
Jun 8th 2017 |
4 min read
|
Algolia

Today we’re proud to announce that Accel has led a $53 Million Series B investment in Algolia – you can read more about it here.

We closed our Series B exactly two years after our Series A. Back then, we knew there would be many challenges to face but we believed we could create something incredible. Since then we’ve continued to learn, to evolve, and as a result we’ve become a stronger company. We’ve grown from 20 to 115 team members, our customer base has increased from 650 to 3,000, and we have 8,000 active implementations, across which we’re powering 25 billion searches each month. We have customers in 100+ countries and we have offices in four cities (San Francisco, Paris, New York City, Atlanta).

With the team, I often say that a funding round is just a means to an end. In the end we will not be judged by how much we raised but by how much we delivered. Today is a time for us to take a new look at our future, and define what “incredible” will mean to us next.

If software is eating the world, SaaS APIs are eating the development world.

SaaS API companies like Algolia are designed from the ground up to innovate. We hold our roots not only in cloud hosting, but in APIs which sought to optimize the speed with which products communicate with users; that meant APIs to post to social networks, to deliver texts, emails & phone calls.

Now we’re in a new era: thanks to pioneers like Amazon, Twilio and Stripe, developers are now able to create the very building blocks of an application itself – authentication, payments, and, yes, even search — all through APIs.

For companies like Algolia, APIs aren’t a secondary tool for extending the core product’s reach, such as Uber’s API, for example, which allows Uber to enable other applications to connect into their ride-hailing functionality. APIs are our lifeblood. They have to be reliable – their SLA payback for anything above %.01 downtime should align with that commitment – and importantly they have to continuously innovate.

The benefits of SaaS APIs are already visible to the developer community: Stripe’s release of Radar in the past year showed how, without making any changes to one’s code base, developers could benefit from Stripe’s payments innovations.

Day after day, APIs must get better for their users. What’s great today is merely good tomorrow and eventually will not be enough. We don’t just want to push the limits of what’s possible with search, we’re designed from the ground up to do so.

All our resources are geared toward improving our API and making the life of developers easier, empowering them to deliver the most engaging experience for their users. Our core engineers handle support & documentation, as well as internally training the whole company on new features before they are released. Our marketing team focuses on educating the greater developer community on how search works and how Algolia works for them.

Back to the future: what does “incredible” look like tomorrow?

Search must become an effortless conversation between user and product. Today’s search trends are rooted in conversation, and ultimately Algolia’s mission is to connect intent with content in the most frictionless way possible. Search and conversation are ultimately rooted in the same three principles – speed, relevance and user experience.

We have invested in building the essential building blocks for creating advanced search experiences, often very nuanced, like search for facet values, a highly valuable feature of search for ecommerce sites and social networks, which end-users ultimately will never notice (unless it’s missing when they need it). As we forge ahead, these building blocks will form the foundation for seamless conversation between user and software.

We will continue to make investments in leveraging the advantages of being a hosted API to deliver innovations in search, not only making it possible to have consumer-grade search previously reserved only for the titans of tech – Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google – but also by bringing search innovations to the public that will redefine search itself.

We will also continue to improve the developer experience, striving to simultaneously lower the barriers to entry for any developer or product team to achieve consumer-grade search, and to raise the bar for what’s possible with search by deploying new innovations across every API client.

Your success is our success, and vice versa.

The best way to build a community is to be one, and Algolia owes a lot to a lot of different people. To our customers, we owe our ability to grow as a company. To the developer community, without whom Algolia would never have been able to advance and improve so quickly. To consumers, whose expectations for excellence have laid down the foundation for Algolia to succeed.

We’re on a mission to connect intent with content, so let’s get to work!

About the author

Nicolas Dessaigne

Co-founder & CEO at Algolia

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Paul

🦄

Vianney Lecroart

? You are so gooooooood guys! Cannot wait to see what you’ll do with the money!

Artas Bartas

Congratulations, guys! The funding is well-deserved, I’m intrigued to see all the innovation – and great marketing – it will enable!

Eric

Good job!

Akka Philippe

I have tried Algolia 2 years ago, what a journey guys. Great Product, customer focused. Way to go guys!!!